Review: Stand, Shoot and Slash in Red Steel 2 Wii

I played Red Steel 2 on my feet, for hours at a stretch. I don’t know if that’s how you’re “supposed” to play this new Wii game, available Tuesday, a first-person shooter in which you don’t do a whole lot of shooting.

What makes this game unique is that your character’s most powerful weapon is his katana, or samurai sword, which you use to slash at enemies by making big, wide swings with the Wii remote (and the MotionPlus accessory, which is required). After about a minute of sitting in a chair swinging my arm around, it just felt wrong: I had to stand up, kick my chair back and play the game while standing. At this point, I’d no more try to play Red Steel 2 seated than I would try to play Wii golf on the couch.

As you might imagine, this was quite a distinctive gaming experience. I’ve never played anything quite like Red Steel 2, which lets you use swords and guns simultaneously, switching back and forth between wild swinging and precise aiming. Much like its predecessor, which was the first FPS on Wii, the game mechanics are original and interesting enough to be fun even if other issues detract from the final product’s quality.

Speaking of which, Red Steel 2 has absolutely nothing to do with 2006’s original Red Steel, which was the proof-of-concept game that showed how great the Wii remote’s pointing ability was for first-person shooters. Other than that, it was an entirely forgettable product. But it sold boatloads.

So it’s not surprising that Ubisoft resurrected the franchise, nor is it surprising that the company junked the whole premise and started anew. Red Steel 2 loses the trying-too-hard gritty realism of the original and goes for a cel-shaded cartoon mashup of feudal Japan and the Old West. Asian dudes saunter around in cowboy hats and chaps, talking in Southern drawls about ninjas and katanas. The signs above the saloons and gamblin’ houses are written in katakana.

Does this all come across as just plain silly? Of course. The dialogue is pure Saturday morning cartoon and the story is utterly forgettable: I barely remember the characters’ names, let alone what it was they were yelling about. The best thing to be said about the setting is that it clearly grew up organically out of the gameplay, itself an East-meets-West blend of swords and shotguns.

Like all Wii FPS games, you keep the controller pointed at your screen to move the aiming cursor, pulling the B trigger to fire. If you move the controller gradually to the sides of the screen, you’ll turn around. Walking is controlled with the joystick on the nunchuk attachment.

But once you get your sword, making big slashes in the air will cause the gun to go away and the sword to emerge. The Wii MotionPlus’ enhanced controls let the game distinguish between the slow, deliberate motions of aiming the gun and the big, fast sword slashes. So when the katana comes out, your point of view gets locked to the horizon — your wild sword swings don’t rock the camera.

You switch effortlessly between sword and guns in Red Steel 2.Images courtesy Ubisoft

Red Steel 2 introduces new sword techniques gradually, but at a rapid pace. At first, all you can do is swing horizontally or vertically. But soon you start learning advanced techniques: Push the sword out to parry an enemy’s attack, or swing it to the ground to cause a minor earthquake, for example. Some techniques let you use sword and gun together — dash around an enemy, then pop him in the back with a well-placed shotgun blast.

It’s not as if the control scheme is perfect. Sometimes the moves just don’t work right — especially the stab that’s supposed to happen when you thrust the controller forward. Maybe I’m not thrusting it exactly perfectly forward, but a little more fudge factor in the heat of pretend battle would be nice.

Besides fighting off cowboy ninjas, there’s something else you’ll be doing a whole hell of a lot of in Red Steel 2: Slashing crates. There are crates, barrels, garbage cans and storage lockers galore, and all of them are filled with money. Money buys you more armor, better guns and katana upgrades, so you want to bust these crates wide open. But there sure are a lot of them. Everywhere. It’s nice to have something to practice sword slashing on, but it utterly fails on the Old Man Murray Crate Review Scale.

Red Steel 2‘s level design is also unique, a series of small, nonlinear areas with different missions to accomplish. You’re fed the major missions, which further the story (insofar as there is one), one at a time. While you’re doing these, you’re given optional missions that let you earn more money; they mostly involve walking all over the levels and finding things — wanted posters of yourself, communication towers, etc.

The flaw in this design is that there’s no big map, and the locations of the various collectibles aren’t marked or indicated in any way. Since many of the areas look identical, it’s hard to know where you are, which caused me to give up on many of the smaller missions since I didn’t feel like slowly skulking all over every inch of every level looking for tiny posters.

And then there are the occasional little polish issues. At one point during a big fight, the screen went black and said “Reading disc,” then started up again. Another time, the game crashed entirely. (I was playing a final retail copy.)

There are a lot of things I wish Red Steel 2 did better, but it gets the big stuff right. The mechanics make you glad that the MotionPlus exists. The extra polish on the graphics (and the perfect spaghetti western music) helps a lot.

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